Do we need a sociology of
dreams?

By Montague Ullman, M.D.

For
sociology, interested only in man awake, the sleeper might as well be
dead.” This is a quote from the late
distinguished French cultural anthropologist Roger Bastide.

Based on
his studies of dreams in transitional cultures in Brazil, he raised the
question: “. . .whether the sociologist
is right to ignore the other half of our life, to envisage man standing and
sitting, but never asleep and adream” (“The Sociology of the Dream” in G.E. Von
Grunebaum and Roger Caillois (eds.),
The Dream and Human Societies,
1966).

In
primitive societies in the early stages of transition, there is a unity between
the world of myth and the sacred as reflected in the dream and in waking
reality with easy passage in both directions.
Western society lacks the institutions that foster this exchange. The door to the dream world is closed to
society at large. It remains open on a
small scale as the container of one’s personal problems to be worked through in
private with a therapist. We live in a
dream-deprived society.

The failure
to recognize the necessity of institutionalizing dreams in a way that makes the
function more visible, has led Bastide to conclude that sociologists look upon
any such institution as dealing with a “waste product” and would not be “within
the competence of a sociology worthy of its name - a kind of social sewer
service.”

Dreamers
make use of images available to them at a given moment in history. Remolded into metaphorical visual imagery,
they convey information of some significance to the dreamer. It seems to me obvious that just as they
contain personal referents, they might from time to time contain social
referents. That is to suggest that
unresolved social tensions also play a role in shaping subjectivity and
surfacing in a dream just as more personal tensions do. As Erich Fromm, Trigant Burrow, and others
have pointed out, there is a social unconscious at play that takes its toll so
long as it remains unconscious. In the
following quote, the sociologist Robert S. Lynd describes one over-arching
source of social blindness.

“Liberal
democracy has never dared face the fact that industrial capitalism is an
intensely coercive form of organization of society that cumulatively constrains
men and all of their institutions to work the will of the minority who hold and
wield the economic power; and that this relentless warping of men’s lives and
forms of association becomes less and less the result of voluntary decisions by
“bad” or “good” men and more and more an impersonal web of coercions dictated
by the need to “keep the system running.” (R.S. Lynd, “Business as a System of
Organized Power” in A. M. Lee (ed.),
Readings in Sociology, 1951)

Here are
three examples of this warping that are encountered in dreams.

#1 When a young woman in therapy, suffering
from frigidity, makes a reference in her dreams to her own sexual organs as a
head of lettuce encased in the empty shell of a cantaloupe situated on the
shelf of a supermarket, she is saying something about her own personal sexual
problems and at the same time making a statement about an aspect of social
life.

The
personal referents are of interest to the clinician. Her sexual organs are seen as objects separate from her
functioning self that can be bought and sold in an impersonal way. Might the social referents be of interest to
a sociologist? We do live in a society
where attributes of individuals such as brains, beauty, talent, and sex are
treated as objects that can be bought and sold in the marketplace.

#2 Racism raises its ugly head when a young
white woman dreams of a black man as a threatening predator.

#3 In Sweden the struggle for equal rights for
women began much earlier than in the United States. There were signs of successful women in all spheres of life. In the eighties I came across a Swedish
magazine article commenting on the dreams of three very successful women in
politics and the business world. Sexism
seemed to be a thing of the past. Yet
in each of the dreams the self-image of the woman was that of a cow who, along
with other cows, was there for the benefit of the farmer.

Freud
repersonalized the dream. Might
psychohistorians not benefit from a resocialization of the dream?